Congratulations to Janet Charman and Cold Snack, winners of the 2008 Montana Poetry Award announced as part of Poetry Day, Friday 18 July. Janet was reading with others at Lopdell House in Titirangi that evening to a packed house. Across town at Poetry Central 08 in the Auckland City Library we were launching Bob Orr’s Calypso and the third of Jack Ross and Jan Kemp’s CD/text anthologies, New NZ Poets in Performance. Great to hear Chris Price, John Pule, Therese Lloyd, Mark Pirie, Anna Jackson and Jack read from their own work and then for someone who wasn’t able to be present (Anne Kennedy, Robert Sullivan, Jenny Bornholdt, John Newton, Greg O’Brien and Olivia Macassey respectively).

Bob’s new book is trenchant and full of delights. Try these (courtesy of Auckland UP):

Purple Octopus

I didn’t sail away because of Helenshe meant nothing to me in particular –I had always found her vainself centred and shallow.Certainly she was beautifulbut no more so than any other Greek celebrity.No I didn’t sail away because of Helenas it happened she was just my great escapeaway from my wife’s stony silencesfrom ploughing the poor soil of a rocky islandfrom mending nets ripped apart by sharksfrom the small talk of fishermendown at my local tavern –that was the reason I sailed away.thanks to our Greek drama queen Helen.When she turned her face toward Troyher nose like a beautiful rudderaltered the course of my life.In her eyes there were peasant girls dancingbut when she smiled a viper slithered out of her lips –to think that she gave birth to my twin epic poems.I signed on with Odysseusfirst as an AB and later on as bosun –our spars made a forest all the way to the horizon.As for Troy it was a plain of dust and deathbest forgotten –the retsina was so bad I took to lacing it with opium.What a jokewe had to build a wooden horse as a weapon of mass destruction.Drunk in a back street I was rolled for my last euro.Blinded and left for dead after a battlea veteran of that mad mid east adventurein the guise of an old hagI begged the long and lonely road home overland.Sometimes in a village I would recite a poem for a salt sardineand always in the back of my mind this crazy story getting biggerlike a purple octopus when it floats up to the surface.This sharp beaked fair timbered well caulked deep sea epic.I now sit bent in a dark questionby the salt violet Aegean.A very old part of me sleeps beneath this pine.A sadder and a wiser manin the loom of these wavesI hear the living and the dead both speaking out of time.Listen while I spinthis yarn&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp thalassa.

An Orange Tree in Lebanon

I was not the burning girl in Vietnamthe ghostly child of starvation in Africaneither was I the freedom fighter rotting in a field of sugar canein Nicaragua.I was not buried in a mass grave in Bosniatortured in a stadium in Chileneither was I impounded in a dog kennel in Cuba.I was not beaten to death in a police cell in Sowetoand I was never shot beneath the innocence of an orange treein Lebanon.Yet all these disappearances have happened in my time.In the back streets of my soulwhich is a country with no namepoppies always bloom beneath the wall of midnight.Therefore I must call the girl in Vietnam my daughterthe child in Africa my sonthe freedom fighter in Nicaragua I could have known as a brother.In a mass grave in Bosnia I saw the face of my best friendthe woman tortured in a stadium in Chile could once have been my loverthe forgotten man held in a cage in Cuba my neighbour.In Soweto the blood on a police cell wallwas the last painting of my sister.In Lebanon the orange tree was the tree of my own garden.

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